“‘A betrayal’: Martin Scorsese under fire from critics for promoting AI in cinema”

Martin Scorsese has officially partnered with the startup Black Forest Labs to promote an AI tool designed to preview scenes from a film. But this collaboration is not well received by Hollywood unions and some fans of the director, who has previously railed against superhero films and streaming platforms.After Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan) and his entirely AI-generated series, Martin Scorsese is now under fire from critics for promoting artificial intelligence in cinema.

Martin Scorsese promotes an AI tool

Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Shutter Island) has officially become the partner and advisor to the German startup Black Forest Labs. The company has developed an AI tool designed to preview a film’s scenes and thus transform an abstract idea into a visual representation. In a video published on YouTube, the director of The Wolf of Wall Street even promotes and lauds it. He explains: “Cinema is a young medium, and we must remain open to the way it can evolve. With this tool, I can share what I have in mind more clearly and effectively with my creative team, the production designer, the art director and the director of photography, so that they can draw on it to enrich cinematic intelligence.”

The solution developed by Black Forest Labs would therefore greatly facilitate the storyboarding and pre-production phases.Some well-calibrated prompts could help film crews, as Martin Scorsese explains when discussing the design of a complex long take: “You can find the solution much, much faster, which saves production time and also reduces the crew’s fatigue and exhaustion”.

A collaboration that doesn’t work

The Art Directors Guild, i.e. the union of Hollywood art directors, argues that “Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese is turning his back on the human artists who, throughout his career, have helped him create his most memorable works”, while pointing out that artificial intelligence mines works without crediting the artists or providing them with financial compensation in order to generate images. For the union, this is simply a matter of a “betrayal of the collaborative nature of filmmaking”. Local 800, the union representing the industry’s art directors, illustrators, set designers and decorators, for its part sees this as a direct affront to the work of behind-the-scenes professionals. Moreover, simply browsing the comments section of the video above shows that this collaboration isn’t working.

Now, this tool may prove useful, but it also replaces a significant part of the creative process, not to mention the countless jobs that it inevitably threatens.As often with AI, the practicality argument serves to obscure genuine issues. Whatever the case, this collaboration with an AI-specialized startup is clearly surprising on the part of the director of Hugo Cabret (2011), a film that celebrates the artisanal and magical dimension of cinema, in the literal sense of the word.

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Source: X